I have fairly minimal technical expertese, so having looked through the wealth of information on this forum is no hurting my small brain!! Hopefully some kind soul will offer me a simple solution?!

I went on a trip to Florida with the charity Dreamflight which takes a plane full of seriously ill children from here in the UK for an amazing holiday. I spent the holiday with one of the groups, filming every moment. I now have 11 seperate video edits (1 for each day) completed in Sony Vegas, which total 2 hours almost to the second. This now needs to be put together on a simple DVD to give to the kids families and friends. I have rendered to MPEG2 but the files won't fit on a DVD at full quality clearly. I have adjusted the video to average bps of 5,000,000 but the quality is horrible.

I filmed the footage on a Panasonic HMC150 and havent converted during the workflow (Im not entirely sure of the exact format, is there a way of reporting on this?) I dont have to worry about DVD's usually, so this is causing me a lot of pain! This is a DVD for the kids parents so I want to do the best job possible, but currently my knowledge isnt good enough for this task! Is there an relatively easy way of solving this issue? Apparently trying to go along the route of dual layer disks has caused big problems in previous years, so that isn't an option.

So....speak slowly and clearly for me...and I really hope someone can come up with something that will help me. Let me know if you need any more info from me. Thanks for any help you can offer!

Your problem with video degradion is not with 5,000.000 Mpeg2. It is more has to do with Vegas unable to down converted your HD video to SD video for DVD. And it did a crappy job for the conversion. You need to do a search here about HD to SD down conversion for DVD. You'll be glad you did, it has a boat loads of very good information, instruction on how to get good quality DVD from a HD source. Good luck.

The video actually looked pretty good at a higher rate...which just wouldnt fit.

Thanks for the link....I have scoured through it, and thats when blood started to trickle from my ear slowly.... It may sound lazy, but it did kinda blow my mind. Any specific posts or methods that you could point me in the direction of?!

Such a shame its such a hard task! Its kinda needs an "idiots guide"...I'd sign up!

Matthew, any reason why you're not using a dual layer disk? We regularly put full documentary weddings (heaviliy chapterised of course, on dual layer disks. Only caution is make sure your authoring system allows playback on all players. We switched from authoring on DVD Lab (which didn't play on Blu-ray and other high end players) to TMPGenc's Authoring Works 4 (which plays on everything.)

I have adjusted the video to average bps of 5,000,000 but the quality is horrible.

Can you define "horrible" quality?
Does the picture look muddy or are you seeing interlace artifacts?
Have you watched it on a TV set?
Did you render it using a 2-pass encode?
Try rendering a short section using the following VBR settings and do it as a 2-pass.
8,000,000 / 4,896,000 / 2,936,000

I'm asking because I shot a 2.5 hr. stage play last spring that went on a single DVD and the quality was fine.
I was using a good camera under excellent lighting conditions which helped a lot.

I regularly put over 2 hours on a DVD but I use TMPGenc to do the downconvert and encode. I always use VBR, 2 pass. With TMPGenc you can see on a scale how the disc is filling up with the length of the video file and alter the bit rate so that it is less than 90% full( at least that is what use). I would suggest you export a lossless file from Vegas and download the trial for TMPGenc V5 and let it encode to DVD.

Matthew, any reason why you're not using a dual layer disk? We regularly put full documentary weddings (heaviliy chapterised of course, on dual layer disks. Only caution is make sure your authoring system allows playback on all players. We switched from authoring on DVD Lab (which didn't play on Blu-ray and other high end players) to TMPGenc's Authoring Works 4 (which plays on everything.)

Your problem with video degradion is not with 5,000.000 Mpeg2. It is more has to do with Vegas unable to down converted your HD video to SD video for DVD. And it did a crappy job for the conversion. You need to do a search here about HD to SD down conversion for DVD. You'll be glad you did, it has a boat loads of very good information, instruction on how to get good quality DVD from a HD source. Good luck.

Actually, Vegas 10 does a fine job downconverting 1080 to SD. In previous versions, I'd recommend going to 720 first, and THEN to SD, but V10 does a great job with straight 1080 to 480. (No reason to think it would be as good going from 1080 to 576.)

Any time you render and you change the frame size, though, make sure you're rendering using BEST video quality.

Rather get simple!! I do stacks of weddings that are around your time frame and although a dual layer disk is "neater" simply a dual case with DVD1 and DVD2 is really easy and cheap. Dunno what you pay for blank disks in the UK but DL's here are around $1.50 each compared to normal blanks at 30c each!!!